More PDF Documents Suffered Malware Infection in May: Avira

German antivirus vendor 'Avira' reveals in its latest monthly report that PDF files infected with malicious software grew 50% in number in May 2010 as compared to April 2010.

Although the infected PDF documents accounted for just 1.20% of the total, the increase was considerable as compared to April 2010, states the firm.

The report says that the other most commonly exploited file extensions were txt, exe, php, dll, jpg and gif. 31% of total malicious files identified had no extension. It also reveals the monthly deviations for cmd (66.67%), ocx (56.25%) or swf (43.30%).

Discussing about the top layer domain (TLD) abuse, the report says that .com dominated both in malware hosting and phishing categories with 44.53% and 49.9% respectively. However, these figures represent a decline over April 2010.

.net and .org followed .com in the statistics. As per the report, .net hosted 6.83% malware sites and 6.69% phishing sites, while .org hosted 5.93% malware sites and 5.42% phishing sites in May 2010.

Avira also reveals that PayPal continued to be the most phished brand, as it was targeted by 44.99% of registered attacks. Others among the five most phished brands were Ebay (16.05%), HSBC Bank (12.04%), Facebook (5.33%) and Bank of America (2.09%).

In addition to this, the report also says that .ru was the most sought after country code top layer domain for hosting malware (4.74%) while .br hosted the highest number of phishing websites (2.90%). The firm also highlights the drastic fall in the number of Korean domains hosting phishing websites, saying that the reason for the same remains unclear. The difference from April 2010 levels is as big as -244.66%. Malicious websites in the country also decreased in May 2010.

Another interesting fact that the report highlights is that there were no considerable changes in the spam category distribution. There were very slight deviations, but the overall ranks remained unchanged. Online Pharmacies spam constituted 50.44% while that of Fake Watches and Fake University degrees constituted 7.34% and 7.26%.

Related article: More Requests For Better E-Mail and Spam Control

» SPAMfighter News - 6/26/2010